Midsummer now, and I’ve complained ad infinitum about the wild raspberries around the garden, but the garden’s gem this year is the raspberries, delectable and sun-ripe. My daughters are frequently around the edges of the garden, bent to the picking task with bowls in hands. Raspberries have formed the tastier bulk of many meals around here.

Where I had seen a barrier and an aggravation has become nourishment. I’m hardly about to let prickery vines overrun the property, but they’re gaining the upper hand, and the girls and I appear none-the-worse.

Early this morning, I pulled over on the roadside at a pasture where cows were grazing and wild turkeys ambled. I walked a little along the road, frogs cheeping, a hawk circling upward and away. Then I realized before me was an enormous sprawl of scotch thistle – hard and thorny – a veritable roadside fence of weed.

Many clouds rise up
clouds appear to form a fence
holding this couple;
They form layers of a fence
Oh, the layers of that fence.

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About Brett Ann Stanciu

A writer and sugarmaker, Brett Ann lives with her two daughters in stony soil Vermont. Her novel HIDDEN VIEW was published by Green Writers Press in the fall of 2015.
Let my writing speak for itself.

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“With vivid and richly textured prose, Brett Ann Stanciu offers unsparing portraits of northern New England life well beyond sight of the ski lodges and postcard views. The work the land demands, the blood ties of family to the land, and to each other, the profound solitude that such hard-bitten lives thrusts upon the people, are here in true measure. A moving and evocative tale that will stay with you, Hidden View also provides one of the most compelling and honest rural woman’s viewpoint to come along in years. A novel of singular accomplishment.” – Jeffrey Lent

“Early in the book, I was swept by a certainty of truths in Hidden View: that Stanciu knew the bizarre and fragile construction that people’s self-deceptions can frame. And that she was telling, out in public, against all the rules, the heartbreaking story of far too many women I’ve known, at one time or another, who struggled to make their dreams come to reality in situations…. …(In Hidden View) the questions of loyalty to person, commitment to dreams, and betrayal of the helpless are as vivid as the flames in the sugarhouse, as sweet and dangerous as the hot boiling maple sap on its way to becoming valuable syrup. There’s so much truth in this book that at some point, it stops being “fiction” and stands instead as a portrait, layered, complex, and wise. The Vermont that we love, the farms that we treasure, the children we nurture are fully present.” – Kingdom Books, Beth Kanell

“Stanciu is a Vermonter’s ‬writer. Anyone who loves the landscape and language of Vermont will be ‬drawn into this story, but her writing holds a universal appeal, too, ‬and rings true with the language and landscape of the human heart and ‬mind as well. The characters in Hidden View are people you’re ‬going to think about, and care about, long after the book is read.” – Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, AS LONG AS THERE ARE MOUNTAINS

"Brett Stanciu writes with enviable poise and precision. Hidden View is a story that burrows deep and stays put. This is a powerful novel."
– Ben Hewitt, THE TOWN THAT FOOD SAVED and
HOME GROWN

"(Stanciu") combines her academic life with her agricultural life to write an enduring story… as rugged as the earth it is based on."
– Steve Pappas, The Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus, Vermont Sunday Magazine

"Stanciu is Vermont through and through. The same can be said of her first novel...”
– Seven Days

"Hidden View is pure authenticity. Every word rings true to this place and its people; I know; I've lived here for 45 years."
– David Budbill, JUDEVINE